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The mirror
Well below two, but if possible not more than 1.5 degrees - the goals for limiting global warming from the Paris Climate Agreement are probably the best-known figures on climate change.
But behind these numbers are complex processes, human fates and changes that take place over decades.
In order to keep an eye on the progress of climate change and the efforts to stop the trend, DER SPIEGEL has been showing the most important figures on the state of the planet since October 2020.
In addition to global warming, information on sea level rise, the shrinking of the Arctic sea ice area, forest loss, the CO2 budget and the share of green electricity in Germany are displayed directly on the homepage of spiegel.de.
We have now added three further aspects from Germany to this information: dryness of the soil, exceptionally warm days and the number of new registrations of electric cars.
The examples of dryness of the soil and the occurrence of exceptionally warm temperatures make it clear that climate change is not to be equated with a non-stop stringing together of records. The years 2018 and 2019 were characterized by extreme heat in summer and drought. In contrast, the year 2020 did not bring about any similar extremes in Germany, but was nevertheless the second warmest year since nationwide records began and there was less rainfall than the historical average.
At the same time, this year's flood disaster in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia shows that isolated events outside of heat waves can have devastating effects. Because not only the frequency but also the intensity of extreme weather events is increased by climate change. For example, warmer air can absorb a higher amount of moisture and then rain down.
On the other hand, the development in electromobility gives rise to hope. The increase in the purchase premium for hybrid and electric cars in June 2020 has significantly accelerated the shift away from internal combustion engines towards more efficient drives. In addition to the current share of green electricity, the figures for newly registered electric cars are the second metric in our graphic overview, which does not focus on the consequences of climate change, but on possible solutions.
In the following, you can read exactly how the newly introduced values are created (sources and methodology for all values can be found permanently documented here).
In addition, the data on the position of the planet is always available on a separate page, accessible at spiegel.de/thema/daten-zum-klimawandel.
There you will also find detailed step-by-step background articles on the individual values with numerous other data and graphics.
How the new values come about
dryness
The summers of 2018 and 2019 were exceptional.
Huge heat waves with no precipitation led to a record drought with crop failures, forest fires and historically low water levels in lakes and rivers.
Researchers assume that the accumulation of unusually dry summers in recent years is probably a result of climate change and is related to the change in the jet stream.
The current state of the soils in Germany is always shown in our graphic. The data used come from the drought monitor of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ).
For this, the UFZ uses daily information from around 2500 weather stations nationwide and uses a hydrological model to calculate the soil moisture in a small-scale grid (described in detail here).
The UFZ publishes the results of the modeling with a delay of one to two days in map form (available here - the information is used for the total soil at a depth of up to 1.80 meters).
We call up this map every day and automatically evaluate the proportion of Germany's area where there is at least a moderate drought.
This is the case when the current soil moisture falls below the long-term 20 percentile, i.e. the value that was only reached in 20 percent of the years 1951 to 2015.
Electric cars
Cars are responsible for around twelve percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Germany.
But despite the goal of significantly reducing pollutant emissions with alternative drives, the proportion of electric cars on German roads has been at a very low level for a long time.
However, electromobility received a significant boost in 2020, primarily due to the increase in the purchase premium to up to 9,000 euros.
In the climate report, we show how many all-electric cars are newly registered on average in Germany every day.
The underlying data comes from the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) and includes all new registrations in Germany (available here).
The value is updated monthly and is usually available around three weeks after the end of the month.
According to a study by the environmental and transport organization ICCT, battery-operated electric vehicles have a significantly better overall balance sheet compared with conventional drives.
A newly registered electric car in Europe emits between 63 and 81 percent fewer greenhouse gases than a petrol engine over its entire service life (if only charged with green electricity).
Plug-in hybrids are not taken into account in our graphic, as the corresponding drive systems are mainly installed in large and powerful models and their ecological balance depends very much on the proportion of the route for which the electric drive is used.
Exceptionally warm temperatures
In order to put the weather situation of the previous seven days in a larger temporal context, we use a long-term comparison.
In the graphic, we show the number of locations in Germany where exceptionally warm temperatures were recently measured.
We do not only consider extreme events such as summer heat waves, but also compare the respective temperature with previous measurements in the same month.
In this analysis, a day counts as exceptionally warm if the average daily temperature was at least as high as in the five percent of the warmest days in the reference period 1961 to 1990. In order to show the nationwide situation, the graphic shows the proportion of German weather stations in the past seven Days reported exceptionally warm temperatures on at least one day.
The data behind the calculation come from the station measurement network of the German Weather Service (raw data available here; data set description).
Both current and historical data are available for over 200 stations, which are incorporated into the daily recalculation of the proportion of stations with exceptionally warm temperatures.
The displayed value is subject to strong fluctuations depending on the weather.
In the long-term trend, however, there is a clearly increasing proportion of days with exceptionally warm temperatures in Germany.
